“OpenText spoke our language. We had many discussions, live demos, pilot programs and weighted analysis between several vendors. But at the end of the day, we felt like OpenText understood the energy market better than its competitors, understood what we were trying to accomplish and could see our vision.”Steven Bleakley IT Client Services ManagerNewfield Exploration Company

Newfield Exploration Company drills deep into its domestic business units with OpenText ECMOpenText Content Suite integration with Oracle Financials and P2 Enterprise Upstream enables centralized access to all well information

Success story

Unified of global business units and documentation into one system

Reduced document search time by 50 percent

Increased speed and ability to get information for permit approval, shortening project schedules and costs

Enhanced management of vendor contracts and agreements to resolve conflicts faster

Newfield Exploration CompanyIndustry• Oil and Gas

Solution• OpenTextTM Content Suite

System Integration• Oracle® Financials • P2 Enterprise Upstream

Results

Newfield Exploration Company drills deep into its domestic business units with OpenText ECM

Newfield Exploration Company is an independent crude oil and natural gas exploration and production company headquartered in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1989, Newfield’s growth strategy has concentrated on increasing reserves through an active drilling program and select acquisitions. Its domestic areas of operation include the Mid-Continent, the Rocky Mountains, onshore Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. The company has international operations in Malaysia and China.

Building on successAs is typical of many high-growth organizations that acquire companies as part of their expansion strategy, Newfield has multiple business units domestically and internationally that have a large degree of autonomy.

Over the years, Newfield has been successful in implementing technology and procedural solutions to increase efficiency and work productivity. These large-scale, corporate-wide projects have brought significant gains in structure and organization to Newfield’s daily operations while maintaining Newfield’s fast-delivery culture. Newfield’s enhancements in IT structure began with financial data and resulted in the implementation of Oracle® E-Business Suite Financials and P2 Enterprise Upstream Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Following these successes, the company set its sights on bringing improvements to its well files.

At Newfield, a lot of important documentation was retained outside of structured environments, such as the ERP or project management software. As a result, even though the core activity for the business units is the same—to extract oil and gas—the documentation supporting these activities was being managed and stored differently for each unit.

A technician would spend valuable time looking for information among a mass of documents stored in multiple locations, such as in rooms filled with filing cabinets or on network and personal hard drives. It could be a Microsoft® Word document, a TIFF file, a log or a mapping file; there was inconsistency in how or where information was being stored between disciplines and across the business units. To complicate the problem further, engineers, technicians and geoscientists—everyone involved in a project—had their own method of creating and assembling their own personal well files, often resulting in document duplication.

Newfield needed to establish an electronic well file that integrated their business units, reinforcing approaches that were more alike than different and acted as what Newfield’s IT client services manager, Steven Bleakley, deems a “master keeper—a system that takes un-structured information and renders it structured and interrelated.” Such a system would help formulate better decisions faster, with a clearer understanding to help mitigate risk. “If you are working on a project and you want to perform a recompletion, but you can’t find the right information or you’re not sure it’s trustworthy, you have to stop. You will have to go and validate the information. The simpler the process, the faster you will get to the right information to help you make your decisions, get approvals and ultimately get the oil and gas out of the ground and drive value for the company,” said Bleakley.

The implementation of OpenTextTM Content Suite has provided Newfield with the foundation for “a one-stop shop,” where most information related to a well exists in one place: a synergetic, searchable environment between Content Suite, Oracle Financials and P2’s ERP systems; Landmark software; emails; documents; logs; well bore diagrams; daily reports—all linked together, reducing query time.

“We can see information quicker. We can see it clearer. And as a result, it dramatically reduces the risks that we face in our industry.” Steven Bleakley IT Client Services ManagerNewfield Exploration Company

Newfield Exploration Company drills deep into its domestic business units with OpenText ECM

“Content Suite is the foundation that allows us to take unstructured data that before sat on file shares and migrate it into interrelated data and people can easily move information between systems,” said Bleakley. “You have to have a materials system. You have to have an accounting system. You have to have a drilling completions project management system. But all those systems generate information, whether they’re PDFs, Word documents or Microsoft® Excel® spread-sheets. Content Suite gives us that foundation to take the information that’s in between those systems and keep the continuity between them so you can easily transition. To the user community, it’s simple, it’s fast and it’s a one-stop shop. We can see information quicker. We can see it clearer. And as a result, it dramatically reduces the risks that we face in our industry.”

OpenText understands the oil and gas industryAccording to Bleakley, Newfield chose OpenText for two main reasons.

“The first and foremost reason was that OpenText spoke our language. We had many discussions, live demos, pilot programs and weighted analysis between several vendors. But at the end of the day, we felt like OpenText understood the energy market better than its competi-tors, understood what we were trying to accomplish and could see our vision,” said Bleakley. The other deciding factor was the Content Suite interface. We were very comfortable with how WebDev technology was supported and appreciated its interface abilities.”

An integrated solution for more efficient information access

“Our custom integration process basically integrates Content Suite with Oracle, some of our Structured Query Language (SQL) systems and the Petroleum Information Data Model (PIDM), which is the state regulatory information database. We pull the well hierarchy from

Oracle as the main driver and it automatically builds all of the well files for us. So when someone sets up a well in Oracle, it is created in Content Suite. The integration process will retrieve data based on the American Petroleum Institute (API) numbers, which is the stated notification number of a well, the Report Center (RC) numbers—which are internal to Oracle—and every other place that we have identified as our key referential data. So for the user, all they have to do is find their well folder and drag and drop documents in the correct folders,” said Bleakley.

A user may choose to explore records from two main interfaces: a well portal or the traditional Content Suite native application. The portal view is a custom-designed dashboard portal that offers users a graph-ical display of all the folders stored in the document management system that are related to a particular well. “This includes a graphical role representation of the documents and a graphical chart that shows the production history. Well header information provides production accounting information and all Advanced Flow Engineering (AFE). It also links to Geographical Information System (GIS) mapping so users can click on a link and are instantly taken to a geographical map that shows them where the well is located. It is a spiderweb of connections and interrelations using the well API number and RC numbers to link Content Suite with Oracle, Oracle with PIDM and so forth, based on the key values,” said Bleakley.

In the second option, the Content Suite view, the folder structures that exist for every business unit, well, prospect and lease are shown. “For the user, all they have to do is find their well file folder and put their documents in—drag and drop. Immediately, it has the first production date, net ownership percentages, spud date, legal description, state, county, business unit, API number—all automatically managed by the system. The system will start populating the search criteria off those

“Getting to the information faster is very important, but equally important is that the system is simple, straightforward and easy to use.” Steven Bleakley IT Client Services ManagerNewfield Exploration Company

Newfield Exploration Company drills deep into its domestic business units with OpenText ECM

values so the user never actually inputs any metadata. There is no retyping or researching required,” said Bleakley. The top-level folders in a well file are arranged by activity, such as accounting, drilling, regula-tory, etc. Underneath the activity are subfolders named after the types of documents related to that activity. In other words, if you open the accounting folder, it contains a cost folder, payout folder and recon-ciliation subfolder—all of which relate to cost, payout and reconciliation documents, respectively. A regulatory folder, as another example, would contain subfolders organized by land management bureau, permits, regulatory reports and so forth.

“Getting to the information faster is very important, but equally important is that the system is simple, straightforward and easy to use,” said Bleakley. “As a growing organization with new hires every quarter, we would not want to have to go through a complicated learning process and extensive ramp-up time of six or eight months for every new employee. We need people to learn the system fast. Keeping things simple and easy was one of the things that this project helped us move toward.”

Newfield appreciates that they have made major changes to how the company functions, how information is used and managed and how this affects the way people do their jobs.

“We’ve taken people resources to another level,” said Bleakley. “For instance, we’re doing well reconciliation pages now that are pulling documents, invoices and material transfers from Content Suite and then linking them up to the budget system. If you’re managing a project and it’s supposed to start on January 1 and end by July 1,

you can easily see the budget plan and how we’re expecting to spend that budget each day. The invoices are stored in Content Suite and you can compare the invoices and the vendors to the master service agreements that are in Content Suite. All of these different systems are linked up with Content Suite.”

Implementation strategyAll of the technology development and custom work was done first: a year of building the well dashboards, integration queue and all of the population pieces between Oracle Financials, P2 Enterprise Upstream, Oracle HR, the contract systems and PIDM. Then, the business lines were brought in to the project and consensus about the global strategy and a standardizing approach were achieved.

Newfield employed three strategies for file migration: back-filing, current filing and forward filing. Current filing is concerned with the information employees felt had to be in the system immediately. Back-filing projects concentrated on going through thousands of files and figuring out where they belong and how to integrate them into the system. Forward filing, or Newfield’s going-forward strategy, mandates that all documents are to be entered into the system, leaving nothing behind.

“We’re still consuming wells and going back into different groups and teams and adding more. There are millions of well documents and several hundred very complete, robust wells. We’re still consuming, still working with different departments to get that all done and we’re really excited regarding how much progress we’ve made and how much information is in there,” said Bleakley.

“Employees don’t have to be shipping copies, and they can instantly pull files whenever they need them. A risk assessment analysis on vendors can happen pretty quickly and easily.” Steven Bleakley IT Client Services ManagerNewfield Exploration Company

Newfield Exploration Company drills deep into its domestic business units with OpenText ECM

Current and back filing were approached differently by various groups depending on the type of document. Although some of Newfield’s employees dragged and dropped information themselves, most of the documents were on paper and needed to be scanned into the system.

Although the system went live in 2008, Newfield is using a staged approach to get all of their business units onboard. Presently, there are 1,250 licenses and 1,400 potential users. Of those 1,250 licenses, 80 percent are in use. “We’re hoping to get to where we have a Content Suite user account for every employee,” said Bleakley.

Building a better enterprise with OpenText Content Suite With the successful implementation of Content Suite, Newfield is looking at projects that will expand their capabilities, creating more value from the system.

About OpenTextOpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight through market leading information management solutions, on-premises or in the cloud. For more information about OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX) visit opentext.com.

Customer stories opentext.com/contactTwitter | LinkedIn Copyright ©2018 Open Text. OpenText is a trademark or registered trademark of Open Text. The list of trademarks is not exhaustive of other trademarks. Registered trademarks, product names, company names, brands and service names mentioned herein are property of Open Text. All rights reserved. For more information, visit: http://www.opentext.com/2/global/site-copyright.html 09486C.3EN

In 2009, Newfield integrated Content Suite with their Master Service Agreements (MSAs). Rather than having a room filled with files that have to be manually searched, photocopied, refiled and shipped every time a question or issue arises with a vendor or service provider, a user in-terface web search page was created to integrate all of the files into the system so that vendor agreements and policies are instantly attainable. Bleakley said that the project had a twofold purpose: “Employees don’t have to be shipping copies and they can instantly pull files whenever they need them. A risk assessment analysis on vendors can happen pretty quickly and easily.”